Germany Is About To Switch On A Revolutionary Nuclear Fusion Machine

11/05/2015

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For
past six decades, scientists have fantasized of a pure, inexhaustible energy
source in the form of nuclear fusion. But now Germany is about to try something
extraordinary. Acknowledged in the plasma physics community as the “black horse”
of nuclear fusion reactors, stellarators are extremely difficult to construct. It
took scientists about 19 years of to construct W7-X. At the moment more popular
cousin to the stellarator, called a tokamak, is in extensive use. Tokamaks have
a main flaw that W7-X is apparently immune to, signifying that Germany’s newest
monster machine could be a real game-changer.

Image
Credit: Science Magazine/YouTube

For years, tokamaks have been deliberated as the
most favorable machine for producing the power of the sun as the shape of their
magnetic coils comprises a plasma that is better than that of presently
operational stellarators. But there’s a major problem: Tokamaks can only regulate
the plasma in short eruptions that last for no more than merely 7 minutes. And
the energy required to produce that plasma is more than the energy engineers
get from these interrupted bursts.

The key to an effective nuclear reactor of any type
is to produce, confine, and control a blob of super-heated matter, called a
plasma. Plasma is a gas that has touched temperatures of more than 100 million
degrees Celsius.

At these tremendous temperatures, the electrons are
ripped from their atoms, creating what are called ions. Under these intense
conditions, the repulsive forces, which usually make ions bounce off each other
like bumper cars, are overcome.

Therefore when the ions collide, they fuse together,
producing energy in the procedure, and you have what is called nuclear fusion.
This is the procedure that has been fueling our sun for nearly 4.5 billion
years and will last to do so for another projected 4 billion years.

Diagram
of the normal tokamak. Notice how it has fewer coatings than the stellarator
and the form of the magnetic coils is different. Image Credit: Uploaded by
Matthias W Hirsch on Wikipedia

When engineers have heated the gas in the reactor to
the precise temperature, they use super-chilled magnetic coils to produce
powerful magnetic fields that comprise and control the plasma.

Tokamaks thus ingest more energy than they actually
produce, which is simply not what you want from nuclear fusion reactors, which
have been publicized as the “most significant energy source over the next
millennium.”

As of the stellarators’ design, researchers think it
could withstand a plasma for at least 30 minutes at a time, which is considerably
longer than any tokamak. The French tokamak “Tore Supra” holds the highest time
of withstanding plasma: 6 minutes and 30 seconds.